Why does my LabVIEW occasionally display in Chinese?

[D_J]

In response to Jon's comment that he believes that the problem is "after upgrading to a newer version of LabVIEW":

The PC that I am using has only ever had LabVIEW 2010 on it and I am fairly sure that I only installed it once.  (I may have run the setup more than once, to change what drivers were selected but it has never had any other version on LabVIEW on it.  It has been used to work with VIs created in LV8.2, but they were created on another machine.)

Sorry Jon....

David

[altenbach]

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@magyar wrote:

Here is a new flavor to the same problem.

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(I don't really think you need to attach a 2.5MB 3840x1080 picture to bring the point across. Sometimes less is more. Not everybody has dual HD monitors! :D)

[magyar]

altenbach,

you are right.

Sorry out the Megabytes!

How do I remove that image?

[altenbach]

You can report it to the moderator.

(upper right corner of post...options...report to a moderator...type your concer in the form).

However, you would need to be able to substitute a cropped image because the post needs to continue to make sense. Maybe we just leave it for now.

[Jonathan_S1]

Thanks for the information!  I will add this information to our records.

Jon S

[Jon_S.]

Hello David,

I'm not sure which situation you are talking about.  Do your Chinese characters only show up on built applications (e.g. Distributed System manager or user built apps)?  If so then repairing LabVIEW should fix your problem.  I noticed that I said this can happen when upgrading LabVIEW.  To be more correct this can occur when using an installer that replaces the LabVIEW runtime engine.  This could be a service pack upgrade, patch or some other installer that includes a patched runtime engine.  This corruption is specific to the runtime engine installed on a particular machine.  You could take an executable that works perfectly on one machine and take it to this bad machine and the problem would be present.

If your Chinese characters are present in the actual VI files then it sounds like CAR 185890.  This corruption is in the VI file so it would persit across machines.  If this is the case please contact support.

[RavensFan]

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@Jon S. wrote:

the run time engine doesn't see the correct file it goes to the next language. In this case Chinese.  

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It's unfortunate that the "next" language happened to be Chinese.  While having this bug where the language changes is bad enough, it might have been slightly more tolerable if it went to a foreign language that people actually had a chance to read and understand such as Spanish, French, or German.

[D_J]

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@Jon S. wrote:

I'm not sure which situation you are talking about. 

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Dear Jon,

I have seen unicode charachter in built applications and the LabVIEW project build window - thankfully none of my VIs have been corrupted.

 It has not happened for a while now - it just happened on one day, in maybe 10 out of 15 builds - and I have not seen it since.

Regards,

David

[Halden]

Hello tst, Falkpl, aeastet, codeman, and others suffering from Chinese gibberish taking over their VIs...

It's happening to me, too.  I have a large program and Chinese just appeared in the front

panel and the block diagram.  Because my deployed applications render Application Font

differently than it shows up on my computer ( all computers are new Windows 7

machines), I have a habit of explicitly defining all my front panel text as a specific font.

I usually choose MS Sans Serif which is what Application Font is supposed to use anyway. 

That enables my text to fit in the controls in the target computer.

Well, all my Application Font items that I failed to change are now Chinese.  The ones I

set explicitly survived.  Restarting LabVIEW, rebooting the computer, etc. don't change this.  

The most-recent executable version is not corrupted.  I have checked a couple other

programs I worked on recently; they're okay, too.  So far, only this major program is affected

and the customer will be here Thursday for training on the system.

I tried some of the Chinese characters in a web translator and confirmed that they are gibberish.

So I don't think LabVIEW is switching between languages.  In some cases the number of 

Chinese characters is half the number of English characters there originally, but not always.

In general, longer strings of English were replaced by longer strings of Chinese.

Here is some context information:

I don't know much about Unicode, but I checked my Labview.ini file and useunicode=true

is not there.  It contains appfont="MS Sans Serif" 12 and BDFont="" 31120 BO.  

I changed BDFont to MS Sans Serif 12 and this did not fix the problem.  But it might be a clue.  

I'm using LabVIEW 8.5 on Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.  Computer is Toshiba Portege laptop.

I've been using LabVIEW since version 5.1 in this job.  Code has been moved to 6 and 7.0 before

being moved to 8.5.  I have done substantial work on this program since switching to 8.5 in

December 2010.

I checked the Region and Language settings in Windows.  Everything is USA default.  Only

English is listed.

Checking Control Panels/Fonts, I do see some Chinese, Korean, and Japanese fonts listed.

I don't know if these were present when I bought the computer in December 2010.

I have not seen anything similar happen in any other program on this computer.

Rebooting the computer does not help.

I have not tried re-installing LabVIEW.

What does 31120 BO mean?

Is there a place in the .proj file that could have corrupted this?

Is there some way to get my text back to English without typing it all in again?

I don't expect "support" to help me because either LabVIEW 8.5 is officially

obsolete or because I bought it more than a year ago and did not subscribe

to the support service or both.

How can I prevent this from happening again?

Thanks to all in advance for ideas!

Halden

[Halden]

Hi all,

Anticipating that there isn't a way to fix the corrupted VI, I got started the

one-object-at-a-time way with a decorruption program.    Instead of attaching

the program, I have its 4 elements listed here.  It's just as fast to write anew.

String Control ------String to Byte Array------Byte Array to String-----String Indicator

So, copy the gibberish from the corrupted VI into Text Control, press the arrow, and

copy it out of String Indicator back into the corrupted VI.

It's really tedious, but beats trying to figure out what each label used to say.

I hope this helps someone.

Also, see _Norm_'s post on page 3 of this topic.  What he wrote is way too advanced

for me to grok, but it might be a way to make a program that could fix a whole VI!

PS, Could someone who has paid for support service feed my previous post to the

NI engineers for their CAR process?  I think it might contain a helpful clue for them.

Halden